Finding Your Sound: The Beths
Lead singer Liz Stokes talks the simplicity of rock, losing a pandemic sanctuary, and actively seeking inspiration in Los Angeles.
by Brad Farberman
Growing up in the early 2000s, Liz Stokes, singer and guitarist for New Zealand indie rockers the Beths, first appreciated the radio hitmakers of the day — Jennifer Lopez, 50 Cent, Green Day. But she soon gravitated to her own discoveries, like Fall Out Boy, Death Cab for Cutie and Rilo Kiley. Learning guitar at the time, she was more interested in what you could say with your axe than the instrument itself. Especially since the skills seemed within reach.
“I liked guitar music, but I think the songs were what drew me in,” says Stokes. “It felt like you could learn how to play them. [laughs] I would be on Ultimate-Guitar.com or whatever, finding terrible guitar tabs and busking at the mall with my friend. The way that you could figure it out on your own was the avenue in for me.”
That attention to songcraft — the details that make a track hooky, concise and universal — has stayed with Stokes, and is apparent on the Beths’ fourth album, Straight Line Was a Lie. Exuberant but moving, the LP makes room for anthems and quieter moments alike, all with a passion for shape and contour. The jangly first single, “Metal,” begins with the line, “So you need the metal in your blood to keep you alive.” Stokes had been dealing with both depression and a thyroid issue, while simultaneously marveling at the very nature of existence.
“I was trying to express the dueling feelings I have about my body, one is that it’s this amazing thing when you look at it — you know, being alive at all — that we crawled out of the ocean and it’s like, ‘Wow, look at this thing, and it’s amazing that it can think and do and make stuff,’” explains Stokes. “But then also I had a new diagnosis of Graves’ disease. I was battling physical and mental health stuff, all together at the same time. And so it felt like this machine that I had little control over, and it was starting to break down. And I was like, ‘Ugh.’ And so it was trying to be a shifting between these two things.”
“Mosquitoes,” which alternates between acoustic and more rocking sections, tells the true story of an Auckland creek partially destroyed by flooding in 2023. Stokes found pandemic-era solace in the space, which, due to climate change, is unlikely to recover. The lyrics are especially heartbreaking: “Lay me here, by the bones / I’m only here to feed mosquitoes / Only skin, only blood / A little less now than there was / A little less now than there was.”
“One day, one storm and it was just different,” says Stokes. “It’s not gone — the creek’s still there — but it’s just different and it’s different than I remember and that everybody who experienced it remembered. And it’s semi-still-closed, but you can still go, but it’s not this big public space that people can explore freely anymore. And maybe one day it will be again, but it’s always gonna be in danger, more and more, because of the way that the world is going. I don’t know, I feel like this song is about this feeling of erosion or something. That the world is changing and I was feeling like I was breaking down and eroding. It’s just reckoning with change, I think.”
In advance of Straight Line, and inspired by Stephen King’s On Writing, Stokes sat down with a typewriter, knocking out 10 pages of lyrics every day for a month. Then, after playing Coachella in April ’24, Stokes and Beths guitarist-producer Jonathan Pearce holed up in Los Angeles for three months, writing songs and making demos. It was also a period of ingestion, with Stokes and Pearce positioning themselves on the other side of the stage for a change.
“It was going to a lot of live shows,” remembers Stokes. “I think we saw Drive-By Truckers. I remember seeing St. Vincent. We were going to a lot of stuff — a lot of comedy, as well. And trying to be listening to music as well, ’cause I feel like sometimes when you make your great love your job, your relationship with it gets a bit skewed. But I feel like you need to have inputs to have outputs. So it was trying to have a lot of inputs.”
Stokes isn’t trying to reinvent the rock wheel. She’ll color outside the lines, but she’s more interested in upholding traditions, and injecting fresh energy into time-tested patterns. The Beths’ Instagram bio reads, “We’re a band we play songs.”
“We’re in a rock band — guitar, guitar, bass, drums,” says Stokes. “And there are these forms, these structures that you can decide that you want to make music inside of. And, you know, you don’t have to — you can do anything you want. You can make up an entirely new musical genre. But I don’t want to do that. I want to play in a rock band. And I want to play pop songs. And I want to write, a lot of the time, within those forms, and then exploring outside of them as well. It’s fun to do that.”
